


find a thread to pull

by verity



Series: white elephant [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alpha Laura, Animal Death, Child Death, Consent Issues, Future Fic, Gen, Horror, Loss of Virginity, Nemeton, POV Female Character, Pack Dynamics, Resurrection, Temporary Character Death, The Hale Pack - Freeform, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-29
Updated: 2013-10-29
Packaged: 2017-12-30 19:57:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1022770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verity/pseuds/verity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one mentions that Beacon Hills has become a white elephant, the kind of territory you can't give away, but Laura can read between the lines. The people who've stayed here, it's in their blood, one way or another. The only way they could get an alpha was to find someone else buried as deep in the land as they are. </p><p>Literally, in her case.</p>
            </blockquote>





	find a thread to pull

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magneticwave](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magneticwave/gifts).



> for magneticwave, whose birthday is on Thursday! many, many thanks to Ashe, febricant, mijra, Kate, peardita, and Scout for all their help and encouragement.
> 
> more extensive content notes, with spoilery details about the consent issues, unrequited love, and temporary character death, are in the end notes.

Laura left for school two weeks before the fire, so she was in class; had to duck her head to hide the light in her eyes, the way her limbs trembled with with power. It wasn't until she'd scrambled out of the lecture hall into the bathroom around the corner that she realized what it was, that something terrible had happened, her eyes flickering ruby and treacherous in the mirror.

"You're still healing," the woman says this time, leaning over Laura. Laura smells more than sees her, rose and sage and ozone, and beneath that: nothing. "The ropes are to protect you."

Laura's mouth tastes like dirt.

—

Lydia is the emissary for a pack Laura's never heard of, the McCalls. They've been in Beacon Hills for the last decade, but they're moving up to territory in Oregon. Lydia moves along too smoothly for Laura to ask questions. "Alpha McCall and Stiles felt that it would be too dangerous to leave Beacon Hills untended," she says, hands folded neatly in her lap. "We all decided it would be best to restore to the Hale line. To you."

"I was dead," Laura points out. For nine years, apparently.

"You're not the first Hale I've resurrected," Lydia says with a sniff. "Stiles will explain. He's your emissary."

Laura looks to Derek, who's sitting at the end of the bed to which she's still bound. There are lines in his face now at the corner of his eyes, more that follow the dip of his knit brow. "What about Deaton?"

"He's not an emissary anymore." Derek glances at Lydia. "It's—complicated."

"I have to leave tonight," Lydia says, getting to her feet. "You can handle the rest yourself. I'll round up Cora and Allison and—"

Laura can feel them now, down in that layer of perception beneath scent and sight and the world—her betas, her pack. She doesn't know her own. "Sure," she says. "You do that."

—

"Hey," her emissary says when he comes in, after she's rested and Derek's come and gone half a dozen times. There's something around his power that feels like the purple shadows beneath his eyes, weary and deep, but his hands are steady and quick on the knots that bind her, ropes slithering apart more at a suggestion than a touch. They're hands that have seen work, scarred and calloused, nails bitten to the quick. He smells like Lydia's roses and the dirt in Laura's mouth, dead and fresh all at once. "I'm Stiles. I'm your—"

"I know," Laura says.

"Of course, alpha," he says, eyes flicking up to meet hers. "Right."

"Am I your first?" she asks, pushing herself up to sit against the headboard, limbs trembling like a foal’s.

Stiles hums, inching the rest of the rope out from beneath her, winding the slack around his hand. "Sort of."

The rest of her pack files in after him, three of them, filling the small room. They’re all older now than Laura was when she died. Derek hangs at the back of the room by the door; Cora, who's living and breathing and strong, sits next to Laura, not quite touching her. Allison is human and smells like gunpowder. "So," Laura says, facing them, feeling them out. "You're my pack, now. Were you—pack, before?"

"Yes," Derek says, at the same time as Cora mutters, "No." Allison doesn't say anything, just eyes the exits. Stiles looks like he's falling asleep, propped against the wall.

Laura fights the urge to roll her eyes. "Hey, you, napping in class over there. Pay attention."

" _Back off_ ," Cora growls.

Laura pushes her legs off the bed, teeth bared. "What alpha taught you those manners?" she says, hooking a claw beneath Cora's chin, tilting back her head so that she can see her sister's eyes.

"Oh man," Stiles says faintly.

Allison kicks his ankle.

—

Laura's body feels taut and new, the way it did when she was a teenager, skin too tight over her breasts and thighs as she budded like a flower. She does now what she did then: shifts, runs through the forest, which smells strange and hostile now, even as the earth beneath her echoes back her claim: _mine._ She pushes through her beta form into the wolf and runs the borders, circles the town once, twice, again. It would be easy enough to stay like this, be California's statistical anomaly, a lone wolf on the prowl.

Allison picks Laura up in her SUV at the end of her last circuit. "You tired yet?" she says, leaning out of the window while the car idles. "If you're not—"

"No," Laura mumbles through her fangs, half-shifted. "I'm done."

They drive around for a while, make the circuit again on paved roads. "Anywhere you want to go?" Allison says when they hit the edge of the preserve.

"I didn't make it to the house, last time," Laura says.

"Sure," Allison says, easy, signaling her turn.

There's not much to see where the house used to be. Derek said, earlier, that the county repossessed it, the house condemned with seven years of property taxes unpaid. Laura was never good with paperwork, lost contact with the family attorney and accountant early on. Now the land's part of the preserve, the house is a clearing in the woods, the location unmarked. Laura doesn't get out of the car.

Afterward, Laura pulls on the spare shirt and cargo shorts that Allison keeps in the back, and they go to a bar where the bartender nods at Allison and doesn't ask for ID. Allison orders for them, beer and fries. "Hope that doesn't offend your pride, alpha," she says as she carries their pints to a booth in the back corner.

Laura shrugs. "You don't have to call me that." Derek never did; Mom was Mom.

Allison takes a long swallow of her beer. "Did you know that my aunt burned down your house? She's dead now. Peter killed her."

"Who killed him?" Laura says.

"Lydia, the last time," Allison says. “Derek, before.”

Laura traces the edge of the napkin beneath her glass with one finger. It's already damp at the center, still dry and textured at the edges. "Good," she says.

—

The vampires have musty, rough skin, like the yellowed paper of the pulp novels that cluttered the dollar bin in Peter's bookstore. "They're more like zombies," Stiles explains as he loads up a clip with the wooden bullets from a trunk in Derek's living room, "but they drink blood, not brains. So I call them vampires."

"They're not vampires," Allison tosses Stiles a shoulder holster. "They're _aimatopotas_."

Stiles puts the holster on, winces, and adjusts the straps before he puts away his gun. "Whatever. They fuck you up if they bite, that's all you need to know. They turn humans, they make wolves rabid."

"We lost the twins before we figured that out," Cora says. "They tore each other apart."

"Don't get bitten," Stiles says, looking up from his gear.

Derek is sitting on the edge of the couch, hands braced on his thighs, watching Cora and Allison sort through the clutter at the bottom of the weapons trunk. He doesn't say anything when Laura curls her hand over the back of his neck, but he hunches in on himself for a moment until she digs her fingers in. “We’re not prey,” she says to Derek.

“Exactly,” Allison says. She flicks two ring daggers a full 360 before she slides them into the sheaves on her forearms.

—

The next week, it's pixies.

No one mentions that Beacon Hills has become a white elephant, the kind of territory you can't give away, but she can read between the lines. The people who've stayed here, it's in their blood, one way or another. The only way they could get an alpha was to find someone else buried as deep in the land as they are.

Literally, in Laura's case.

—

There’s a place in the forest Laura’s wolf doesn’t want to go, whines at softly whenever she gets within a few hundred yards. Laura gives it a wide berth when she runs through the forest. The land feels sick there, heavy, like the earth around chemical plants and toxic waste spills, though the scent doesn’t churn her stomach and make bile rise up in her throat. Instead, it’s seductive, promising, demanding: _more, more_.

"Yeah, that’s the nemeton," Stiles explains when she asks, spreading out a map of their territory over the bright pine of Derek's kitchen table. "Lydia and I tapped into it to bring you back. We were hoping that would drain off some power, but there doesn't seem to be much change. It’s a beacon—it calls things."

"Like a Hellmouth." Laura's seen _Buffy_ ; everyone's seen _Buffy_.

Stiles's mouth crooks up at the corner. "Sort of."

"Can we close it without a natural disaster?" she says.

"Lydia and I have been working on it for a while," Stiles says. His thumb traces the arc of a ley line from node to node. "Maybe. Now that you're back—you're a Hale. It makes a difference. We didn't—it was just Scott, for so long."

—

Allison's an Argent, a hunter. She might have been McCall's mate, once, that's what Derek says; Allison doesn't talk about McCall, although she mentions a wolf in his pack, Isaac, sometimes.

"Kira's—she agreed with Lydia, that we had to bring you back," Allison says, when Laura asks. "Otherwise, it would have to be Derek or Cora, so—"

"Yeah, not so much," Laura says. They're sitting on the back porch of Derek's house, drinking iced tea. Everyone else is at work: Derek at the hospital, Stiles at the high school, Cora at the sheriff's department. Allison doesn't seem to have a job, at least not one with regular hours, and Laura's still dead, officially. "Why not you?"

Allison smiles. "Try me."

"I wasn't offering," Laura says.

"Derek used to say it was a gift," Allison says, pouring herself some more iced tea.

Laura snorts. "Our mother said that. She said we were gifts, too."

"My mother's dead," Allison says. "Derek bit her, then she killed herself."

Laura's quiet for a moment, keeps her eyes on the neatly mowed lawn. There's a bunny by the fence, nibbling at the edge of Derek's vegetable plot. "I want you to be my second," she says, rubbing her thumb through the condensation on her glass.

"I'll think about it," Allison says, tracking the rabbit’s movement on the perimeter.

—

"Did you miss me?" Laura says when she comes home from the supermarket and finds Cora in the kitchen, making herself a sandwich. Cora has her own apartment on the other side of town; Laura's staying with Derek for now, in the sunny bedroom upstairs beneath the eaves.

Cora rolls her eyes, goes back to spreading mayo on her sandwich. "I'm pulling a double and I didn't pack dinner. If Stiles checks on me and I haven't eaten—"

"What a mother hen," Laura says drily.

"Shut up," Cora says. "His dad used to be sheriff, he was the one who got me the job. And he's dead now, so Stiles—it's not like Derek or Allison let him fuss over them."

The groceries aren't going to put themselves away, so Laura starts emptying the bags, meat and milk first. "But you do."

"No one else is going to, God," Cora says. "Leave it alone."

Laura puts the vegetables in the crisper, fruit and tomatoes in the bowl on the counter, dry goods in the pantry. She doesn't say anything else, leaves Cora with her sandwich in the kitchen, goes out and lies on the lawn for a while to burn and heal and burn again in the sun.

—

Peter was the Hale alpha, and then Derek, and then—a long stretch of nobody, their power gone into the ground to save Cora. There's a story there, but Laura never quite gets it, too caught up in the druids and foxes and banshees, the lives of these strangers-not-strangers who are _hers_. Laura spent a lot of time being dead.

Derek's much the same as she remembers, except he's gone from fucking up everyone's lives for the objects of his affection to just brooding earnestly at them from afar, like he isn't a grown man who owns a home and a hatchback. Stiles doesn't seem that similar to the kind of the girl Derek used to go for: he's pack, part of their lives, sharpened and warped by years of fighting on their side. Cora and Allison treat him like a wolf, their own, always throwing their feet up in his lap and resting their heads on his shoulders.

"What's he got that makes you all want to hop on his dick?" Laura asks Derek while they're out patrolling the woods one night. Derek’s the easiest to be around, after Allison; he was her one and only for so long, while Peter slept, waiting. "Stiles—"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Derek says.

"You trust him," Laura says.

Derek trips over a root, barely catches himself in time. "He's earned it."

They don't talk the rest of the way up to the ridge that overlooks the town, a postcard view that always fills Laura with a covetous, proprietary thrill of _mine_. Their mother sat her down here when Laura was twelve to tell her that she'd be their next alpha, that she'd be heir to all this: it would be hers to protect and care for, when she was ready. Six years later, there was the fire; six years after that, Laura died half a mile into these woods.

"Do you trust me?" Laura says.

"Of course," Derek says. He's still her stupid, loyal boy.

—

There’s nothing very special about it, the place where she died, and Laura doesn’t recognize it at first. All of her attention is on the carcasses piled up haphazard, flesh nearly picked clean to give way to glistening white bone: deer, rabbits, a few birds, a vole. She doesn’t have to see the knife marks to know that they didn’t die naturally. Whoever it was cut hard, decisive, gave them no time to fight, just went straight across the throat each time.

When Peter killed her, he was quick, too, and Laura didn’t struggle much, either. He wasn’t the uncle she remembered, sly and clever and not very kind, or the maimed shadow that remained after the fire: she looked up into his face, as he shifted, and froze. No one’s asked her about it. Laura doesn’t know where he died, if there was anything that remained when Lydia was done.

Putting the bones into the ground doesn’t take very long. She digs a long trench, as deep as she can on her own, and carries the corpses in one by one before she covers them with the freshly-turned dirt.

—

She goes over to Stiles's house the next day, lets herself in with the key he gave her. The house is cute, brick, split level, in one of suburbs built in the 70s. The carpeting in the hall is the original shag, a faded but recently vacuumed mustard yellow. There are photos everywhere: Stiles, his parents, Allison and Lydia and—that must be McCall—as fresh-faced high school kids. This is his family home, probably: Stiles is an orphan, too.

Mom always used to say that pack _was_ family, but Mom said a lot of things.

Stiles doesn't seem surprised to find her in his living room when he comes in, arms full of papers to be graded. "Make yourself at home, alpha," he says. "Coke or Pepsi?"

"Ugh," Laura says. "Do you have anything real to drink?"

They have whiskey, neat, in heavy glass tumblers that Stiles rinses before filling; it's not the cheap stuff. Stiles lets her get a few sips in before he asks, "What's going on? Is there—"

"There's nothing," she says. "I just—wanted to see you."

"Hmm," Stiles says, swirling the liquid in his glass. "Well, here I am."

Laura looks at him, really looks: the barely-tamed hair, toned arms, and fair skin with paler scars, one a thin sliver beneath his left eye. Stiles is wearing a short-sleeved plaid button-down with a tie that doesn't match and no-iron khakis. On the surface, he looks like a high school science teacher, which he is. His hands cup his tumbler, warming it, and there are scars there, too, all up the back of his fingers and down to his wrists. Like someone tried to flay him alive.

"I don't understand why you didn't go with McCall," Laura says. "I want you to tell me."

Stiles puts his glass down on the table. "Scott didn't want to leave," Stiles says. "He's a True Alpha, I told you that, he's one in a lifetime, he's—he could do anything. It's not getting better here. We tried, and tried, but we couldn't— And Kira, they're having a kid, she wanted to be near her family—"

"You don't want that stuff?" Laura says.

Stiles shrugs. "I have to fix it," he says. "Allison and I started this with Scott. We woke up the nemeton. We'll stay until it's done. And my family is here."

"Your family is buried here," she says with gentleness she doesn't feel.

"Good enough for me," Stiles says, topping off their drinks.

—

Allison pulls up to the house on her motorcycle one day and says, "Come on," throws Laura a helmet she doesn't need.

The nemeton is a tree stump, not so far from the main road that runs past the preserve. There's a queer wind that blows around it, but Laura can't feel the power until she puts her hand on the wood, lets the energy crawl through her palm and shake her limbs like the alpha power did when it bloomed inside her. Laura can see them all now: Paige and Jennifer and Peter, who died here, and Allison and Scott and Stiles, who brought the nemeton to life. The vision takes a moment to fade when she pulls away, steps back into the clearing, inhaling sharply as she tries to clear her head.

"When we died, fed it. Deaton said it would leave a darkness around our hearts," Allison says. "A shadow. Do you feel it?"

Laura swallows, closes her eyes, composes herself. When she goes down to the bottom, beneath the power vested in her, she can feel the tug of the nemeton pulsing sluggishly, but nothing else is different. "I was always like this," she says, shaking her head. "Even before I came back."

Allison nods.

They walk out of the woods slowly, taking a meandering route back to where Allison parked her bike. It's getting close to sundown and the sky is turning from blue to orange at the edges, framed like stained glass between the branches above them. "Still thinking about being my second?" Laura says.

"No," Allison says, glancing over. "I accept."

—

The humans in her pack are simpler to handle than the wolves, who circle Laura warily; her blood, her brother and sister, Derek with his sad eyes and Cora with her sharp mouth. Derek is always dressed at home, at least boxers and a shirt. Laura doesn't remember him being so modest. With age, his body has grown softer, less solid, and he smiles sometimes, at Stiles or Cora. His movements around them are loose and familiar, like he's forgotten how dangerous it is to bare his belly.

"Tell me about the alpha pack," Laura says to Cora, sweat drying on their skin from a run. Cora is in athletic gear, Laura stripped down to naked flesh, her middle form. "Tell me—you ran with them, for a while."

Cora toes the dirt at her feet, features smoothing back into their human mask. "They tolerated me as long as they had use for me. I came back because I heard that the Hale alpha was back. I thought it was you."

"Derek?" Laura says. It didn't sound like Peter was alpha for long.

"He was a shitty alpha," Cora says. "He bit kids, he fucked around with—it wasn't good. He wasn't like the alphas, though, or Scott—he was just, he didn't know any better. You didn't teach him."

Above them, the moon's bright, waxing, nearly round. Laura lifts her eyes to look at it, but doesn't tilt back her head, expose her throat. "No, I didn't."

"Derek was a kid, too," Cora says. "He's—he's grown up a little now, I guess."

Laura rolls her eyes. "You guess."

Cora punches her in the shoulder, or tries to; Laura catches her wrist before the blow lands. "Shut up," Cora says. "You don't know what it was like."

—

Before the fire, Laura's eyes were gold, and after that, she did what was necessary to protect them and no more. Derek was the one who got into fights, in the string of towns they drifted through; she was perpetually dragging him out by the scruff of his neck, sinking her teeth in when they got home. For days afterward, the wounds would linger, slow to heal, but when they were finally gone, the whole thing started again.

Laura never bit anyone else. She was a fuck up, too, stuck in neutral, Mom's words always looping through her head: _you'll be their leader, their nurturer, their keeper; you'll help the pack grow, one way or another_. But it was just her and Derek and Peter, year after year. She and Derek were two years apart, had never been close. Probably, he'd have married out before she became alpha if the fire hadn't happened—boys usually did—and then they would have seen each other at holidays, maybe, a few times a year. Instead, they slept together in the same bed most nights, tangled up with each other. Their pack was gone: there was no one else for them but each other.

—

Derek's a nurse at the hospital, a LVN. He works with McCall's mother, who blinks, then frowns when Laura comes in to find Derek when he's on shift. "Is it an emergency?" McCall's mother says.

"No," Laura says. "I can wait." She pages through months-old issues of _People_ and _Cosmo_ while she sits in one of the chairs by the nurses's station. The kids she remembers from Cora's TV shows are grown now, married, having kids, going to rehab. She skims the style editorials; the nice thing about dressing in jeans and t-shirts is that they never really go out of style. Even mom jeans seem to be back in.

Fifteen minutes later, Derek shows up, smelling like iron and antiseptic soap. "What's wrong?" he says, dropping into the chair next to Laura's and pitching his voice low. "What's—Melissa will cover me, if I have to—"

"I can't come and visit my baby bro at work?" she says.

"You never have before," Derek says.

Laura shrugs, flips to the next page in her magazine. "Just wanted to check in."

"I told Sandy you're my cousin," Derek says. "He thought he recognized you."

The redhead at the nurse's station looks familiar, but Laura doesn't remember him. Maybe they went to school together; he looks about as old as Laura should be. "Hmm," she says. "What's my name? I hope you came up with something good."

Derek winces and gestures to the magazine in her lap. "Angelina."

Laura sighs. "You're going to have do better than that next time."

"You'll forgive me?" Derek says.

"Maybe," she says, looking away before his face can fall.

Laura stacks the magazines up on the table and squares the edges before she leaves. Then she takes care of the sprite infestation with Allison; they get burgers afterward.

—

When she shifts all the way, takes on the wolf—and isn't it funny how that came so easily to her, when it was such a big deal for Mom—she runs wherever she wants, through the woods and the town. If nothing else, this has stayed the same—the sure knowledge of her body, the reassurance of the ground beneath her feet and the breeze on her face. It's true that the earth here is tainted with power, that the wind churns, uneasy, with the pulse of the beacon in the woods, but they are hers. They are what she came back, was brought back, to claim.

Tonight, she ends up in Stiles's back yard, watching his movement through the house by the progression of lights from kitchen to living room to kitchen to bathroom to his room upstairs. He comes outside a few minutes after the last of them turns off, Allison in tow. They're half-dressed, Stiles in boxers and Allison in a long t-shirt that barely covers her ass. "Alpha," Stiles says. "What's up?"

Laura shifts, pulls her long hair back from her face. "Do I need a reason to come see you?"

Stiles studies her for a long moment—he doesn't stare at her face, the way Derek does, now—before he says, "As Alpha Hale, maybe. As Laura, no."

She doesn't even know how much she needs those words until he says them, how they undo some knot in her chest, the tightness in her shoulders, like she's a doll whose limbs drew together with a string that's snapped inside. "Laura," she says. "I'm just Laura tonight."

Inside, Allison pulls the shades and Stiles pours them glasses of whiskey. Up close, they smell like each other, layers of sex and sage and steel. They don't offer Laura clothes, try to treat her like Mom or some human playing house, just sit down with her in the living room in the dark with all the soft noises of the settling house and the world at rest around them. She used to sit around with her cousin Esme like this when they were kids, sneaking out of bed at night in the summer, stealing cookies out of the pantry and eating them on the back porch or the deserted living room, too lazy to bother shifting.

"Scott didn’t want to go," Stiles says after a while. "We've been friends our whole lives, almost, since we were in first grade. To get him to leave, it was like I had to break up with him, I just couldn't get it through his head that he didn't have to _do_ this anymore, that nothing he could do would change anything."

"Lydia?" Laura asks.

Allison leans back in the recliner, props her bare feet up on the coffee table. "She agreed with us."

"So you brought me back to clean up your mess," Laura says.

"No." Stiles shakes his head. "I figured you'd let us do it. You'd take care of your own. Scott doesn't know when to stop caring."

Laura can see through the dark how he's bent over in the armchair across from her, staring at his clasped hands. "You are my own," she says. "I know I'm not good at this."

"You're trying," Allison says. "That's more than enough."

Laura sits back on the couch, puts her feet on the edge and folds herself up so she can tuck her chin on her knees; a car comes by and the headlights splash briefly against her legs, filtered through the blinds on the front window. "How old were you? When you found out—"

"17," Allison says. "My aunt."

Stiles clears his throat. "I was 16 and I, um, actually—I found your body, in the woods. Half of it."

She can't help it—she laughs, can't stop, peals that go straight down to her belly and hurt after a while, keep going until tears prick at her eyes. "That shouldn't be funny, but—"

"Graveyard humor," Stiles says. "You gotta have it, in this line of work."

Laura keeps going until her chuckles fade into whimpers and she can feel it, the tug in her belly, the pull of the nemeton pushing up against the ghost of the wound that severed her in two. She's been divided since that day in the bathroom, though, looking into scarlet eyes, faced with the impossible reality of _Laura_ and _Alpha_ in the same body, unbidden power coursing through her veins. "I don't want to die," she says. "I mean, again."

"Me neither," Stiles says, and Allison nods. Laura remembers: the bath, the ice, the drowning.

"Pinky swear?" she says, extending her hand.

"I'll pass," Allison says, but she drops her feet off the table and leans over to pour them another round.

—

Cora leaves her a parking ticket the next week, stark white on the dark hood of the Camaro. Laura waits for Cora for hours on the steps of her apartment building, crumpling and smoothing the piece of paper in her hands, letting it flutter in the updraft. "Finally," she says when Cora shows up, hair mussed, still in uniform. "You could have just called, you know. I have a phone."

"You were illegally parked," Cora says, stepping around her to get to the door. "In front of a hydrant."

Inside, Cora's apartment is homey, in a furnished-by-Ross way: floral damask upholstery, polyester chiffon curtains, throw pillows three-deep on the couch. Laura has to shove them into the corners to make room for herself while Cora strips, kicking off her shoes, untucking and unbuttoning her shirt, wriggling out of her khakis until her human garb is pooled on the floor. They've never had law enforcement in the family before. Mom was on the city counsel, Dad was a teacher, Peter owned a bookstore. Aunt Perry, Esme's mom, is a minister.

"Sorry." Laura nudges a discarded sock up with her toe. "I won't do it again, Officer."

Cora drops into the recliner facing the TV, the red impressions around her waist from her snug pants fading as she goes. "I can't make it stick," she admits. "You're still legally dead. Have you thought about… working on that?"

"Seems complicated," Laura says. "I don't know anyone who could do the paperwork anymore."

Cora sighs. "The acting sheriff's kind of a stickler. He's not in on it yet."

Laura raises an eyebrow. "Stiles's dad was?"

"So, you remember him," Cora says sharply. "He was a good guy. He took care of us."

"How'd he die?" Laura says.

Instead of answering, Cora turns on the TV. They watch _Iron Chef_ for a while.

Later, Cora changes into a sports bra, shimmies on jogging shorts, TV still going in the background. She grabs a smaller keyring from a hook by the door and tucks it into a little pocket between her shoulder blades. "You coming?"

"Yeah," Laura says grudgingly. She doesn't really understand Derek's TV or the DVR setup; she's never going to find out how this truffle souffle turns out. "Let's go."

They take the long route around the preserve, the one with the path that switchbacks up the big cliff and trails off just south of the view of town. Laura lets Cora lead them further south to where the stream forms the border, away from where the big house used to be. She hasn't been back since she went with Allison and no one has offered to go with her.

"John had a heart attack," Cora says when they come to a stop by the stream. "I was with him, we were coming back from a B&E in the valley. Scott was negotiating a treaty down south—there was no one to give him the bite, and there wasn't time, anyway. He was driving. We hit a tree."

"Oh," Laura says.

"Stiles's mom went slow," Cora says. "It was better, this way."

—

Derek tacks the birth announcement from McCall and his mate on the fridge; it lasts one day before Cora trashes it. Allison's dad comes through town and there's a tense dinner where the two of them argue about a lost shipment of C-4 and maintaining their treaty with the Wallace pack to the east. Stiles goes up to Oregon for a weekend on "emissary business," comes back with his mouth tight and angry.

He shows up at the house while Derek is at work, messenger bag slung over his shoulder. "Lydia thinks—" Stiles dumps out a slew of loose papers onto the dining room table. "She thinks that we have to start over. That this whole time, we've been thinking we can just—seal it off, or drain it, but that's not possible, we have to redirect the flow or regulate it or something, I don't even know."

Laura catches a scrawled astrological chart before it can hit the floor. "Did you hold the kid?"

Stiles sighs, scrubs his hand over his face. "Yeah, I held the kid. She's cute. I mean, she's Scott's kid, of course she's—"

"Of course," Laura says.

They end up on the couch together, papers scattered all over, Stiles dozing against Laura's shoulder. Derek comes in later and curls up on Laura’s other side, puts his head in her lap, like he used to when they were little. She runs her fingers through his hair, scrunching them gently against his scalp. If Allison and Cora were here, she’d have them at her feet, completing the circuit. It’s just her, though, so she lets herself fall asleep between them: safe enough, with her back to the wall inside her den.

—

The next week, there’s a Sasquatch.

“I didn’t think those were real,” Allison admits, sighting it through her binoculars. “They are in the bestiary.”

“There was a special on the Discovery Channel and I made my mom tape it,” Stiles says. “You owe me twenty bucks.”

Cora sighs and leans back against a tree. “This fucker stole a cooler and broke a tent pole, he hasn’t done anything in the past two days except eat uncooked sausage and shit. Do we really have to—?”

“ _Yogi Sasquatch_ ,” Stiles says, rapt. “Derek, give me your phone, you’ve got the best camera.”

The Sasquatch stays five days and makes off with someone’s picnic basket to Stiles’s overwhelming delight. Laura lets Cora mark it off as a kill on the whiteboard when he goes.

—

Allison gets a call from Lydia during a meeting—they have them now, weekly, in the kitchen, over the table that's slowly accumulating scuffs and rings from glasses—and steps out into the garage, snatching an amulet from Stiles. "It's a Cone of Silence," he says when Laura gives him a look. "Get it?"

"You should use a coaster," Derek says, shoving one at him.

Cora stuffs another oatmeal raisin cookie into her mouth.

After, when Derek's headed off to a night shift and Stiles and Cora have gone home, Allison herds Laura onto the back porch. "Lydia wants to talk to you," she says. "Stiles—he's not going to—did anyone tell you about Jennifer?"

"My brother likes the crazy ones." Laura shrugs. "What's new?"

"She was trying to harness the nemeton's power through sacrifices," Allison says. "Stiles doesn't use that kind of magic, and Deaton—"

"He was a vet," Laura says. There's none here now; you have to go the next town over.

"Stiles won't use blood," Allison says. "Lydia will."

—

"We've tried doe's blood, stag's blood, Scott's blood—" There's a scuffle on the other end of the line, like Lydia's wedging the phone between her shoulder and her ear. "Derek's—"

"Does Stiles know about this?" Laura's in the back yard, leaning against the weathered fence. She has a smartphone that's more like a computer, flat and shiny in her hand; the last one she had before she died was a battered, reliable Nokia brick.

Lydia sniffs. "Stiles knows exactly as much about what I do as he wants to."

"Does he know what you did to bring me back?" Laura says.

"I like you," Lydia says.

—

Lydia and Stiles tore up the wolfsbane over her grave with their bare hands; Allison did most of the shoveling. There shouldn't have been much left, after nine years, but Laura's body had been sewn together and pumped full of human embalming fluids by the county, so there was still flesh on her bones for Lydia to take, along with her hair and nails, before they boiled her down to her bones. Allison laid out Laura's skeleton on the earth where she'd died, and Stiles took on the power of the nemeton while Lydia slaughtered a deer beneath a dark sky: the new moon.

("It takes life to give life," Lydia said. "The kind of life you want, anyway.")

Laura's body took a week to grow from the inside out. They covered her with a tent and Stiles and Lydia traded off shifts: twelve hours, eight, six, four, and by the end, two. Lydia gave Laura deer, rabbits, crows, birthed her in blood, made her whole and new.

—

Stiles teaches biology, four general classes, one AP, and one lab course that's dual enrollment with BHCC. His lab kids grow flowers in test tubes; he brings some of the roses home, puts the vials in a rack in the window, mists them daily and tops off the grow medium every now and then. They'll outgrow their vessels soon, have to be potted or planted outside. "I haven't planted flowers in years," Stiles says. "Not since Mom—"

Laura looks out at the back yard, through the sliding door that leads onto the wood deck, but the patio set blocks her view of the plot in the back. "There are flowers out there now," she says.

Stiles shakes his head. "That's—there's nothing out there that's not _for_ something."

They're drinking together again, bourbon, something aged and sweet that cuts nicely across Laura's palate. The alcohol doesn't affect her, but the ritual is relaxing. She likes being here, in the dark, shifted or not, clothed or not, where her body is her own, and her time is—purposeless. Stiles has done something to the house to make the echoes softer, the noise from outside fainter, as soothing as a womb.

"Lydia said—" she starts, stops before she gets going. "I'm not your alpha now," she says. "You're not my—you're my friend."

Stiles smiles, lopsided, a little loose from bourbon and the late hour. "I'm not a very good emissary," he says, eyes flicking up from his glass to meet hers. "Lydia is—she's good, she'll be great someday. She'd win a medal, if they had medals, you know."

Laura tilts her head toward him. Mom tried to train her out of it as a kid— _you're wolf, not a dog, Laura_ —but it didn't take. "Who told you that?"

"Doesn't matter." Stiles shrugs. "I care too much. You gotta be—neutral, real neutral, like the middle square on the chart. Your alignment. I didn't go to school for it or anything. Just—Deaton, you know? Good guy."

"Caring's not bad," Laura says. "Whose idea was it? Bringing me back."

"Mine," Stiles says. "See what I mean? Selfish. I wanted Scott to get out of here, so I—"

"Lydia says it takes blood," Laura says. "She told me what Jennifer did. Virgins, warriors, healers, philosophers, guardians—we have all of them, in our pack. She said that might be enough."

Stiles rolls his glass between his palms, swishing the dregs of his bourbon around in his glass; Laura's getting to know his ticks, the way he fiddles with things when he needs to focus, nervous energy bleeding through. "I thought I was gonna die then," he says. "If I didn't get someone to fuck me. It wasn't like I—didn't think every day, okay, about where my dad was gonna find my body, and how, you know. This was different, though, because there was something I could do about it, except I couldn't, I wasn't—no one wanted a piece of this, okay? Not even Jennifer. Harsh."

"Way harsh," Laura says.

"Way harsh," Stiles agrees.

Laura reaches out, touches his hand. It's calloused, from where he's held a gun, a pen, a trowel, and the scars are smooth beneath her fingertips. "Lydia says you won't do it."

"Nope," Stiles says. "You want me to?"

Laura shakes her head.

Stiles nods, then raises his finger to his lips. "I won't tell anyone. It'll be our secret, okay?"

—

Derek comes home with a stack of books: do-it-yourself everything, construction for dummies.

"Building a treehouse?" Laura peeks over his shoulder on the way to the refrigerator. "A doghouse?"

"No." Derek dodges the finger she tries to jab in his side. "Melissa's talking about redoing—if she needs help, I thought I'd—that's all."

The malt syrup has gotten lost somewhere behind the five kinds of ketchup and eight types of mustard Derek thinks he needs. "That's all, sure," Laura says, rummaging through the top shelf. "Sure you're not going to add on to the house while you're at it? Because that's, like, _Holmes on Homes_ levels of—"

"Would there be something wrong with that?" Derek says sharply.

"Hey, it's _your_ house," Laura says, then, "No, no, I don't—Derek—"

He's already slinking away towards his room, hurt wilting every line in his body. When Laura was younger, it used to make her so angry she had to sink her claws into him and roar; that never worked. Derek's sweet and broken right down to the core, and there's nothing she can do that'll fix his belief that he's tainted, cursed himself with some backwards Midas touch where everything just turns to shit.

Wouldn't it be nice, if things were that simple.

Laura makes her egg cream, drinks it, and washes out her glass before she goes upstairs. The door to Derek's room isn't locked. He's sitting on his bed when she opens it, an old issue of _Architectural Digest_ spread out over his lap, flipping from infinity pool to infinity pool spilling into a parade of sunsets. "Is that the ad section?" she says when he gets to the fancy stoves.

"I could put in a new range," Derek says. "This one's—"

"That probably costs as much as a car," she says, crossing the room to drop next to him on the bed. "None of us bake."

Derek scowls. "I do."

"You buy the ready-to-bake cookies and then you eat the dough off the sheet, they never get within five feet of an oven," Laura says. "Doesn't count."

"I don't do that anymore," Derek says, pulling his knees to his chest.

Laura scoots up next to him until their shoulders bump, close enough she can smell the guilt and frustration. "I'm sorry the pack isn't—like you want," she says. "It's not your fault. I'm not good at this."

Weirdly, Derek almost— _giggles_ , lets his head drop back against the headboard with a thud. "You're not good at this, right. You don't even—you weren't here when—they're _dead_ , Laura."

"Who?" she says softly, reaching over to take his hand.

Derek tells her about Erica and Boyd. He tells her about Peter.

—

Eight people died in the fire: Mom and Dad, Cora, Aunt Polly, Aunt Mel and Uncle Roger and their kids, Clay and Marissa. Cora doesn't talk about how she came back, although she does say, once, when the subject of Peter comes up and Stiles leaves the room, that Hales are hard to kill. It's always seemed the other way to Laura, but they have the luxury and perspective of a decade she hasn't, and she understands the temptation to rewrite the story, to say: we were forged in fire.

Erica and Boyd, Ethan and Aiden; Sam, Rachel, Parker. "Was your mom part of the pack?" Laura looks up from her notebook. She's in a corner booth of the diner with Allison, nursing a Coke and munching her way through a plate of chili fries.

"No," Allison says, then: "Peter's not on there."

"No, he isn't," Laura says, penciling Stiles's dad's name at the bottom of the list.

—

An incubus shows up in town, and Derek is the only one who can kill it.

"I'm going to get him werewolf drunk," Cora says afterward, wrapping the body in a tarp; it's her turn for cleanup. "Get Stiles out of here, I can't even look him in the face right now."

The incubus has been posing as a substitute teacher at the high school; it's a sore spot for everyone, especially Stiles, who spent a week getting paler and paler before Allison figured out what was going on. He's sitting at his desk in his classroom now, head pillowed on his folded arms, while Derek hovers over him, hands shiny with the incubus's silver blood.

"Cora needs you." Laura keeps her voice low enough not to disturb Stiles. "This isn't the time."

Derek's head jerks up, like he wasn't aware she was in the room; he's going to get them all killed again like this. "What?"

"Go help Cora," Laura says. "I'll take care of him."

Allison drives them home, hands steady on the wheel, though they were trembling earlier after the incubus fed from her mouth. "You should know," she says. "Stiles can't—we can't—Derek acts like he's some fucking special princess, but he doesn't have anything chaining his heart. He doesn't have any—"

_A darkness around our hearts. A shadow. Do you feel it?_

"Oh," Laura says.

—

"Truth or dare," Allison says, pouring them another round.

"I'm not five," Stiles says.

"Dare," Laura says. There's mistletoe in her glass, some mix Stiles cooked up so she can drink with them. The mistletoe syrup is bitter beneath the sharp, woodsy flavor of rye: it seems appropriate.

Stiles's eyes match his whiskey, limpid in the low light of in the living room. "Touch your toes."

Laura rolls her eyes. "I'm a _werewolf_ ," she says. When she gets to her feet, though, she's wobbly. Her joints feel loose and her face is hot. Maybe she's had more whiskey than she thought—it's not like Allison couldn't drink any human under the table. When she focuses, the bend is easy, but keeping her balance as she touches the floor is not. She has to go farther, though, under Stiles's even stare and Allison's more watchful eyes: she drags the tips of her fingers from her toes over the glossy hardwood to behind her feet, where she plants her palms flat on the floor.

Stiles catches her when she starts to fall over, tips her back onto the recliner. "Okay, okay," he says. "You proved the point. My turn now."

Allison holds up her glass, like she's covering a smile. "Truth or dare?"

"Since when do you get to ask all the questions?" Stiles says. "Fine. Truth."

"Who'd you lose your virginity to in the supply closet at prom?" Allison says.

There's a long pause where Stiles narrows his eyes at Allison, who's sitting next to him on the couch, their thighs pressed together. Laura is abruptly conscious of the intimacy of the moment, her borrowed shirt and boxers, the way Allison and Stiles smell not like sex but sleep. "You know that already," Stiles says.

"Laura doesn't," Allison says. "Answer the question."

Stiles sighs. "I took Cora to prom. Let's never talk about it again."

"Wow," Laura says, impressed despite herself. "Everyone really does want on your dick."

"She's like my sister now, don't say that, it's gross," Stiles whines, covering his face in his hands.

Allison sips her whiskey, puts her glass down and drums her fingers on the table. "Your turn, Laura," she says.

—

Nancy Garcia, the alpha of the pack in Redding, comes to visit for a few days.

"This is pretty weird," she says after they run the perimeter. They've come to a stop at the overlook of the town, taken a seat on one of the rocks nearby. "No offense, Laura."

"Yeah, I know," Laura says. Nancy's the same age as Derek; the last time they saw each other, Nancy's mom Consuelo was alpha, and Nancy came down for the summer like Laura had gone north the previous year. The two of them went skinny-dipping in the creek with Esme, who's married to a dentist in Boulder and has two kids, according to Facebook. Now Nancy's all wise around the eyes, broader at the hips, carries herself like someone who's seen shit.

Laura's seen shit, too, so that's fine.

"Beacon Hills is an ambitious territory to hold," Nancy says, casting a glance into the woods behind them where Laura died, where the nemeton grows sicker and more twisted every year. "Scott had a hard time. He's a nice kid. Have you met him?"

"No." Laura shakes her head. "The pack waited until he was gone to—I think they were trying to be tactful."

"He's a little ray of sunshine," Nancy says. "Except kind of sad, at the same time. This place wears on a person."

Laura shrugs.

They go see a movie, some comic book franchise with a lot of explosions, eat ice cream, strip down to skin in the creek. They're both alphas now: they can do whatever they want and there's nothing sneaky about, but Laura still feels an echo of the giddy glee she felt at seventeen, knee-deep in the icy water, half-shifted, shrieking as she splashed water at Esme and Nancy. That was the summer she lost her virginity, to Esme, on one of those hot summer nights. Her body felt—she never thought about her body. There was nothing deliberate about pleasure or pain, it was all bright and new, unexpected, unanticipated.

"Call me if you need anything," Nancy says, keys in the ignition of her Toyota, leaning through the rolled-down window.

"Of course," Laura says. They both know that she won't.

—

Next, there's a witch.

"I don't understand the difference between a witch and an emissary and a druid," Laura says to Cora. They're on their own patrolling the forest while Stiles and Allison go on a trilingual research binge and Derek does—whatever he does. "Why are they so—"

"Witches are unmoored," Cora says like she's reciting from a script. "Emissaries are druids, and druids are rooted in the ground. Witches are tied to the other elements. Water, air, fire. Stuff that spreads and transforms."

It's a clear night, easy to see the way beneath the waxing moon, so they run another mile before they stop to rest in a clearing. There's a fire pit, recently used: the ashes are wet, thoroughly doused, and it smells like treated charcoal. "Are witches… bad?" Laura says after a few minutes.

Cora's sitting on the stump of a fallen tree, drawing in the dirt with a branch, doodles—stars and hearts and moons. "They're anything. I don't know."

The witch's name is Vindhya; he's from New Jersey. He lives in Cora's apartment building and recently bought the gas station at the edge of town. "It's a living," he says when Laura and Stiles show up at work to interrogate him. "I quit drinking a few years back, now I'm trying to quit the business. The magic business."

"Beacon Hills isn't exactly the best place for that," Stiles says.

Vinnie shrugs. "This place was cheap. You think I didn't wonder why?"

Laura lets Vinnie stay. He gives her a discount on gas.

—

Another full moon comes and goes. Laura wakes up in Stiles's back yard the morning after, leaves still in her hair; she lets herself in the back door with the key on the chain around her neck. Stiles is showering, already up even though it's 7AM on a Saturday, a habit that's carried over from the work week. He doesn't seem surprised when she lets herself into the bathroom, too. "Need to shower?"

The latch clicks into place behind her. "Probably," Laura says.

Stiles pulls aside the shower curtain and holds it back for her to step in.

Under the spray, he pulls the leaves from her tangled hair, gentle, shampoos it and conditions it before he helps her wash. Laura never bothers with a washcloth, but Stiles grabs a clean one from the shelf by the shower, wets it and squirts some of his unscented bodywash into the hollow it forms draped over the palm of his hand. "This okay?" he says, starting with her forehand, behind her ears: safe places.

"It's fine," Laura says as she watches the dirt slough off her feet beneath the spray. "I want you to touch me, if you—I don't care. I want to get it over with."

Stiles is quiet for a while, hands thorough and impersonal as he scrubs her shoulders, her back, takes the grit from the folds of her knuckles and her knees. "I didn't bring you back for that."

Laura nods. "I know."

"I'm sorry," he says.

"I don't mind anymore," Laura lifts her arms so he can get to her armpits, the inside sweep of her arms. "It's—okay, not being dead."

"What a recommendation," Stiles says drily. He drops the washcloth at last to cup Laura's breasts. They're small, out of scale beneath the broad span of his hands. Laura doesn't want him, but she could. "You want to have sex now?"

"I'm here, aren't I?" Laura says.

She washes between her legs quickly, the crack of her ass, turns off the showers and steps out into the towel Stiles holds out for her. He dries off her hair with a second one, drops it on the bathroom floor when he's done. "Sorry, I'm—" Improbably, his cheeks pink. His dick's flushed, too, stiff and curved against his belly already.

"No," Laura says. "That's good. Unless you—"

Stiles rolls his eyes, composed again. "Don't be stupid."

—

The box of condoms on the nightstand is open, and Stiles's sheets smell like him and Allison. Laura sprawls back on the bed, touches herself while Stiles puts one on, practiced and smooth, pinching the tip before he rolls it over his dick. She hasn't wanted to fuck anyone in a long time—she gets herself off every few days, but it's quick and efficient, like scratching an itch or working out a knot in a muscle. Stiles is easy to want, long and lean with those clever fingers. It doesn't matter that she can't feel for anyone the things she's supposed to feel: Stiles has a matching wound inside, a dark mass around his heart where Laura has a hole.

"You sure you don't want me to—" Stiles says, climbing over her, onto her, nudging apart her thighs. "I can—"

Laura shakes her head. "Just do it." She wants to feel it.

When he tries to push in, she's too tight, infuriatingly tight, and Stiles pulls out for a moment to grab a bottle of lube out of the drawer. "I don't want to hurt you," he says as he dribbles some onto his dick, slicks some more between her legs and fingers her. "It doesn't have to—"

"It always hurts," Laura says.

(The first time, her first body, was painless: just Esme's tongue on her, then her fingers inside, opening Laura up. It was perfect, secret, simple, outside in the grass in the summer.)

The second time, Stiles penetrates her with one slow roll of his hips, and it feels like all of the air leaves her body to make room for him. "Too much?" he says, braced on his elbows over her.

Laura inhales, exhales, stares at the wall over Stiles's shoulder, splashed with a stripe of bright sun pouring through the window. "No," she says. "Keep going."

—

They shower together again in the afternoon, and Laura looks at her body in the mirror while she towels off her hair. There's nothing to see: same trim frame, same auburn hair beneath her arms and between her legs. "Here," Stiles says, handing her a shirt, underwear, a pair of jeans. "These are Allison's—they'll probably fit you."

"Thanks," Laura says, pulling the shirt over her head. The jeans are too long and too narrow in the thigh, but she'll survive for the walk home. "I'll let Allison know I borrowed her clothes for my walk of shame."

Stiles snorts. "There's nothing—it's not _weird_."

"Yeah, you'd do it for anyone," Laura says. "You're noble like that."

"It doesn't have to be a walk," Stiles says. "I'll drive you home if you want. You don't have shoes."

Laura shrugs. "I'll survive."

Of course, she gets home just as Derek does; he's bringing in paper towels from the car, two 12-packs, they must have been on sale. "I'll start dinner," she says, breezing past him through the garage into the kitchen.

Derek drops the paper towel onto the oil-stained concrete. "You smell like Stiles."

"So?" Laura showered, it's not like she walked in here drenched in Stiles's come or wearing his clothes. She unhooks a saucepan from the rack on the wall, puts it under the tap of the sink. "I went over there this morning."

"Is this—are you making fun of me?" Derek says.

"Not everything is about you," Laura says. She salts the water and puts it on to boil.

When she looks up again, Derek is gone.

—

Cora stops by while Laura is eating her dinner. It's nothing fancy, just spaghetti and marinara sauce from a jar that Laura heated up in a bowl in the microwave while the pasta was cooking. "I'm going to kill you," Cora says, slamming the door to the garage behind her, coming to stand over Laura. "You ready for that?"

Laura keeps chewing her mouthful of spaghetti. "Go ahead," she says after she swallows.

"Is this some kind of test?" Cora says. "That's fucked up, Laura. You're—"

"You brought me into this world," Laura says. "Go on. Take me out." She twirls some more noodles around her fork.

When Allison comes over later, Laura's done the laundry, cleaned the kitchen, cleaned the living room. So the dryer is running, the dishwasher is loaded, and Derek's stack of _New Yorker_ s has been nudged under the coffee table: that's about what Laura is capable of.

"I have some of your stuff," Laura says when Allison shoves a bucket of fried chicken from KFC into her hands. "It's in the wash."

"Whatever," Allison says. "Derek left me a weird voicemail. I think he's off crying wolf in the forest now, I heard a few howls."

"Ha, ha," Laura says.

They eat fried chicken and watch every episode of _Mail Call_ Laura has DVRed until Derek comes home around midnight, filthy and miserable. "You want some KFC?" Allison says. "We saved a few drumsticks for you."

Derek shakes his head. He leaves muddy foot prints on the carpet as he stumbles over the couch, drops to his knees and puts his dirty face in Laura's lap. She weaves her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck, says, "Der—" She's not sorry, though, she's not.

Allison reaches over, tilts Derek's head until she can grab him by the chin, jerk him upright from where he's fallen. "Get it together," she says. "You're not the only one who can't have what they want."

—

The ghouls go after children.

They start with a little boy, Jack, whom Cora finds bloodless and crumpled in a derelict barn after a 48-hour search. Then there's a girl who turns up on the old Hale lands, white around the mouth, open-eyed stare vacant and dull. Laura finds Eva on one of her runs, gets Allison to call her in.

"Ghouls like graveyards." Allison flicks through the bestiary on her phone. They're still in the car, idling in Laura and Derek's driveway. "They like abandoned places. Places people have been and don't go anymore. They can shapeshift, look like animals; that's how they lure in kids."

"This whole town is a fucking graveyard," Laura says.

"You're telling me," Allison says, putting the car in reverse.

Stiles hems and haws, looking over his own copy of the Argent bestiary—the one that's still in Latin—before he pulls out a jumble of notebooks and binders from his shelf. "Lydia had to get rid of some when we were in college, while she was away at MIT." He flips through a few binders before he finds one filled with printouts heavily annotated with ballpoint pen, print scoring deep furrows in the cheap paper. "Ah," he says. "Blood."

"Yeah, they like blood, we've noticed that," Allison says. "What with the desanguination and all."

"That's how Lydia got rid of them," Stiles says. "Virgin's blood and holy water."

There's a pointed silence.

"I don't know any virgins," Laura says.

Allison rolls her eyes. "You don't know anyone but us."

"There'll be another solution." Stiles closes the binder, grabs another notebook filled with the same cramped writing. "Lydia just likes to do everything the easy way, that's all."

—

A third child disappears, a girl with tight red curls and a huge smile on the missing poster. Her older sister is one of Stiles's students.

"We need Sheriff Morales," Cora says when they meet, clustered around the kitchen table again. "They're going to bring in the FBI if—"

"You know how _that_ goes," Stiles says. They share a long look.

Derek's scooted his chair back as far into the corner as he can, until it bumps up against the hutch that's full of weird glass chicken dishes and paper plates in the cabinet beneath. "Morales can't stand you," he says. "He hates—you're a shoo-in for John's position, you're going to gut Morales in the next round of elections. I don't think you should—"

"Does that matter more than the deputies he's sending out in the middle of this?" Cora snarls.

"No one's going after _them_ ," Laura says.

Allison sighs. "This is going to start drawing other kinds of attention."

"See, even Allison agrees with me," Cora says, pushing back her chair from the table. "We can't—"

" _End of discussion_ ," Laura says, alpha-voiced, glaring at Cora until she sits back down.

"You really think we can do this on our own?" Stiles says to Laura, after Cora's left, while Derek washes dishes and Allison hovers by the door. Stiles's shoulders are bowed, his mouth set.

"We will," Laura says. What other option do they have? Beacon Hills is already a beacon to everything fucked up in this world, _abandon all hope ye who enter here_. Anyone they ask could ask for help would just be dragged down with them or make everything worse. Laura stands, puts her hand on Stiles's shoulder. "We will," she says again, firmer this time.

—

Stiles finds the missing girl's body on a Saturday afternoon.

"She's at the nemeton," he says when Laura picks up the phone; she missed his first call, half an hour ago. "I called Cora, I called Derek, Allison's—it called us here."

"I'm on my way," Laura says, and hangs up.

The dead girl is sprawled on her back over the roots of the nemeton. Her name is Sydney Ann Howe and she's in second grade. Was. Her throat's been torn out, blood dried black on her flowered shirt and jeans. Allison's standing over Sydney, an expression on her face that Laura can't name. Laura's mouth tastes like ash.

"They're just ghouls, they're not supposed to be able to _think_ ," Stiles says, coming out of the woods. His hair's all askew, like he's been tugging his fingers through it. "They're—I don't know why—"

"It's the nemeton," Allison says. "It wants blood."

"You think I don't know? What if we just made it worse? Maybe it's all for—" Stiles stops suddenly, staring at the ground, rich and polluted with dried blood.

The power waiting there burns in Laura's veins. "Bringing me back, you mean."

Stiles looks stricken. Allison just says, "Yes."

_A darkness around our hearts. A shadow. Do you feel it?_

Maybe Allison thinks they can't love, but that's not true. People do terrible things for love.

—

"Where's Cora?" Allison says. They've been waiting for an hour, watching Sydney's body cool. "She should have been here ages ago."

Stiles shifts uneasily. "Derek said he'd be—he had to finish his shift, first. It's not like this is urgent."

"Are we going to have to give statements?" Laura says. This isn't like the last body, which she'd found as a wolf. They've contaminated the scene: their footprints are everywhere, and they'll be the only ones. Maybe they should have brought Morales in. She didn't think—she didn't _think_.

Allison's mouth tightens. ""We'll figure it out. We can dump the body if we have to."

"Someone has to find her," Stiles says. "God, someone has to—"

"Don't act like you've never found a body before," Allison snaps.

"No _kids_ ," Stiles says, crossing his arms.

"That's right," Allison says after a moment. "Scott found the baby."

Laura looks at the stump of the nemeton, dead and dry, with its treacherous roots spreading through the ground, rippling through the whole of her territory. A sacred tree, once, before someone stripped it to the ground, apples and leaves and branches and trunk, like that book Cora loved when she was little. Sydney's eyes are closed; she looks like she's sleeping. Lydia could bring her back, maybe. She won't. "Derek shouldn't see her," Laura says.

Allison glances at Laura. "He's seen lots of dead kids already," she says gently. "You can't protect him, Laura."

When Derek comes, he doesn't look at Sydney—carefully, carefully—just at Stiles. Derek hovers by him at arm's length, not touching. "You're—are you okay?"

""Don't. Just—don't," Stiles says, stepping back. "I can't, right now, okay? I can't do it. I can't fix anything, clearly, I can't—"

Allison starts to say—something—but she's drowned out by the harsh buzzing noise that fills the air.

—

The ghouls take Derek from behind. There are three of them, spectral except for the long, needle-like teeth filling their bloody maws in jagged rows. One of them goes for the neck, another for the thigh, the last for the gut: maximum damage for minimum effort. They're fast. Derek gets a moment to open his mouth, face frozen in surprise, before he disappears behind a murky cloud.

"No," Laura says. "No."

Her eyes burn; her skin prickles. She doesn't register moving, just taking the mess that's left of her brother into her arms. He's so still, his blood soaking her jeans, her shirt, his innards spilling out onto the dirt and fallen leaves. His lips are still parted, like he's going to inhale at any moment, like this is all a joke, a dream. This is all dream. Maybe this is hell. Maybe this is her punishment, for—being given everything only to resent it, not to see what she had before it was taken away.

"Laura," someone says, tugging at her arm. Faintly, Laura registers someone screaming; she doesn't care.

Laura didn't say anything when her family burned. She took Derek with her and left. She didn't say, "I'm glad you lived," because she wasn't. There was no Mom, no Dad, no Cora, no—Derek is on the list now. Derek. His eyes are open. Derek, baby brother, stupid, stupid, and he's never going to—

"Laura," someone else says. Firmly.

Lydia's wearing cream and rose gold and her hair's lit up by the setting sun behind her. There's black blood all over her, her bare arms and throat, splashed across her dress. "Let me," she says, kneeling down in the dirt to put her hands on the wreck that's left of Derek.

"No," Laura says, quieter this time.

"It's okay," someone else says. He crouches down so she can see him without looking away from Derek. Laura recognizes him from the pictures on Stiles's walls, his crooked jawline, windswept hair. "It's going to be okay," Scott says. "Lydia's going to fix him. We got here in time."

"I called them." Cora kneels at Laura's side, helps her support Derek's head, uses one of her thumbs to shut Derek's eyes so they're not staring up at them anymore, unseeing. "I knew we couldn't—"

Allison sinks down on Laura's other side. "Scott," she says.

"You should have called sooner," Scott says. He's wearing a t-shirt and jeans, nothing special, in bloodless juxtaposition with Lydia's finery. "Did you think I wouldn't—of course I came, I'll always come."

Stiles puts a hand on Scott's shoulder, tugs back until Scott looks up at him. "I know."

Laura watches this time. She watches the dirt slough off Derek's organs as they climb back in his body, impurities oozing from his wounds as they knit under Lydia's direction. He's so pink, everywhere, pink and red under his pale skin. "Who's going to die for him?" Laura says.

"Those ghouls just did," Lydia says. "So—the kids, I guess, if you want to get technical about it." She's smaller than Laura remembered, petite, copper curls massed in a knot at the nape of her neck. "I wouldn't."

Cora sighs. "I didn't call this in at the station. I think we're better off moving the body and cleaning up the scene at this point."

"Sounds good," Lydia says. "I'll help. Laura? Alpha Hale?"

"Whatever," Laura says as Derek's soft belly knits together. "Whatever you want."

—

"Sorry to meet like this," Scott scratches the back of his neck. "You seem—Stiles says good stuff about you."

They're at home watching Derek while Lydia and Cora do the heavy lifting with Sydney's body and Stiles and Allison rest upstairs. Derek is on the couch in the living room, chest rising and falling with little shallow breaths. He hasn't woken yet, but Lydia says that's to be expected.

"You, too," Laura says.

Scott's taller than her, muscled and athletic. He gentled Cora with a look, calmed Stiles with a touch, silenced Allison without a word. Although he offered his help, he let Laura carry Derek back to the car on her own when she refused. He's serious, kind, gracious. "I should have asked you first, before we came," he adds. "Cora said—"

Laura hates him, kind of a lot. "It's fine."

"No, it's not," Scott says. "I—later, I want to—I want to make sure we can use each other as resources. I guess, when you first—I didn't want to ask anything of you, you know?"

"I don't know how we can repay your help," Laura says stiffly.

Scott shakes his head. "There's nothing to repay."

On the couch, Derek coughs, twitches in his sleep.

—

Lydia's eyes have taken on a glossy onyx sheen when she returns to the house. "We should talk more about long-term strategy at some point," she says to Laura as the blood drips from her dress to the floor, leaving the fabric once again pristine.

By the door, Cora has her arms around Scott, her face buried in his neck. "I missed you," she says. "I should have gone with you, I should have—"

"No," Scott says, pulling back. "Your family's here. Your—"

Laura shifts, all the way, right down to the wolf in her bones: there are a few things that not even a True Alpha can do, after all. Then she lets Lydia open the door for her and runs.

—

Here's the Hale meadow, where Cora and Peter burned, and all the rest with them.

Here's the vet clinic, where Allison and Scott and Stiles drowned.

Here's the clearing in the woods, where Peter tore out Laura's throat.

Here's the nemeton, where Derek died, and Jennifer, and all those girls and boys Laura can barely name—Paige and Heather and Dennis and Emily and—

Here's the stone with Laura's name on it, with its mocking dates and epitaph: _beloved sister and daughter_.

—

Derek's still asleep on the couch when Laura comes back in, and Cora's sacked out in the recliner beside him. Scott and Lydia are gone. Allison's in the kitchen, spooning ground coffee into a filter.

"Hey," she says, glancing at Laura. "You want breakfast?"

The tile is cool beneath Laura's bare feet. "Maybe later," she says. “It’s early.”

Outside, the sun's starting to come up, purple and orange rolling up behind the trees. The clock on the stove says it's 5:32AM. Whatever Laura's lost, she still has this: her pack, shitty grocery store coffee, the oncoming dawn. Another day, another dollar. Another life.

Stiles shuffles in from the hallway, carrying a throw that he drapes over Laura's shoulders. "Morning, alpha," he says.

Allison swings the basket of the drip brewer into place.

"Morning," Laura says.

  
  
  
  


  


_when life seems dangerous and unmanageable_  
_just remember that it is, and that_  
_you can't survive forever_

[(x)](http://cecilspeaks.tumblr.com/post/60819505168/episode-27-first-date)  


**Author's Note:**

> consent issues:  
> \- Laura is resurrected without her consent (she was, um, dead at the time)  
> \- Laura and Stiles have sex so that she can get rid of the magical cachet of her virginity. They both consent to the sex, but Laura doesn't particularly enjoy it.
> 
> unrequited love:  
> \- Derek is in love with Stiles, but Stiles can't love him back because of the darkness around his heart. 
> 
> temporary character death:  
> \- Derek dies for about five paragraphs, or a few minutes in the story.
> 
>  
> 
> I'm [ladyofthelog](http://ladyofthelog.tumblr.com) on tumblr.


End file.
